Announcing Our Innovation Partnership
I’ve taken the obligatory tour at countless organizations, but nothing prepared me for Qualtrics. It wasn’t the cereal bar on every floor of their massive Provo HQ or the live music stage with everything you need to start rocking, and it wasn’t even the dogs sitting next to their owners in the open-space work environment that impressed me. It was that everyone, and it’s no exaggeration to say everyone, I saw was working their heart out, collaborating in teams, and doing it all while smiling. People were so happy to be there. It was incredible. Creating a great culture is impressive enough, but Qualtrics has also maintained this culture while scaling up a world-class SasS product (via bootstrapping) that’s fundamentally disrupted the way primary data is collected. For all of these reasons, Emperitas jumped at the opportunity to partner with them to bring faster, deeper, more actionable insights to the research industry.
We Go Way Back
The Utah Community Research Group (UtahCRG) was one of the earliest adopters of Qualtrics at the University of Utah, where every semester my engaged-learning students are paired with a local nonprofit to research their users and donors for growth opportunities. Unlike traditional market researchers, my students face incredibly short timelines. Online surveying through Qualtrics has been their saving grace because it’s easy to teach and quick (but powerful) to use.
During the process, we became power users of the platform and were Qualtrics Featured Researchers for the work we were doing with their tool. This work included using the panel feature to fuse customer lifetime value (CLV) data to more than 4,000 patron surveys for the Utah Shakespeare Festival, using the bipolar question type and cluster analysis to segment donor personas for Head Start, and using choice-based conjoint to help the University’s own Technology & Venture Commercialization office. Nothing the UtahCRG has done would have been possible without Qualtrics.
When we founded Emperitas it was a given we’d use Qualtrics as our main tool for survey research, so I enlisted help from one of my many organizational moles (a former student of mine who was hired at Qualtrics after graduation) to obtain research suite. This set of products has been critical to the work we’re doing at Emperitas, and recently we used it to help Goldman Sachs collect information from refugee services providers in Utah.
It isn’t uncommon for Emperitas clients to have their own Qualtrics accounts and to tap us for advanced analytics with their resulting survey data. This is what happened with BYU’s fan experience survey, where we combined data from multiple sources, including more than 15k surveys, to cluster fans into different personas so BYU could better personalize their fan experience at each football game.
The Impact of Our Partnership
It’s never been easier to collect your own data, and right now a team of happy Qualtrics engineers are working their hearts out to make it even simpler and faster. As wonderful as this added speed and ease is, the real value of their platform is its customizability. Whether it’s through advanced survey flow programming (a feature we use on every survey we make) or through controlled distribution and question logic using the respondent panel and embedded fields, the end result is a highly relevant survey that engages the respondent and results in high-quality data.
Our innovation partnership is built on this customization. With Qualtrics you get access to the most powerful survey tool on the planet, and with Emperitas you get your own team of agile research and data experts to handle everything from the initial research design, to advanced survey programming, to fusing other observational data (like app data, customer purchase records, etc.), and finally to mining survey results and presenting them in visually rich, easy to understand reports focused of actionable insights.
Qualtrics + Emperitas = Research World Domination